Monday 12 February 2018

Tony Albert

Tony Albert Sorry 2008

Sorry commemorates the apology on 13 February 2008 by the former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, to Indigenous Australians who have suffered as a result of ‘past mistreatment’ by the Government of Australia. Yet, Tony Albert is neither championing hopeless blind optimism nor pessimism through his work. Aboriginal people have been offered many broken promises. Here, Albert and his army of kitsch faces, has taken this word on face value until real change is observed. read more

Janet Laurence

Janet Laurence Matter of the Masters

Janet Laurence’s work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. Her work occupies the liminal zones or meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Profoundly aware of the interconnection of all life forms, Laurence often produces work in response to specific sites or environments using a diverse range of materials. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underllying themes in her exhibition work. Read more

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski Personnes 2010

DORIS SALCEDO

Doris Salcedo Atrabiliarios 1992-1997

In 'Atrabiliarios' Salcedo evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer's response is, in turn, emotional, even visceral, rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes as relics or attributes of lost people, donated by the families of those who have disappeared. Shoes are particularly personal items as they carry the imprint of our body more than any other item of clothing. She then sealed the niches with a membrane of cow bladder, which she literally sutured into the plaster of the wall as if picturing the literal process of internalised bodily memory. read more

Tom Nicholson

On 30 August 1999 East Timorese voted overwhelmingly to become an independent nation in a ballot sponsored by the UN. Following the announcement of the result, occupying Indonesian troops carried out systematic destruction throughout East Timor. Within two weeks several thousand civilians were murdered (a precise number is unknown), 200,000 were forcibly transported to concentration camps in West Timor and other parts of Indonesia, and most significant infrastructure was destroyed.

Books were targeted for destruction. Libraries were systematically burned, amongst them the widely-used university library and the English library in Dili. Private collections of books were targeted, and in notable cases book collections of prominent intellectuals and independence activists were collected on the street where they were publicly set alight. In villages, schools were systematically destroyed.

Action for another library was established in Melbourne in response to these circumstances. Thousands of books were donated by bookstores, libraries, and individuals. They were shipped to Dili in containers where they now form part of the nascent National University Library of East Timor. Read more

Tom Nicholson After action for another library 2010

TONY CRAGG

Tony Cragg New Stones – Newtone’s Tones, 1978, plastic.

“I use everything but, preferably, after it has been used by man… what interests me is the special critical appraisal that we apply to manmade objects and man’s activities.It’s a real problem; the world is full of manmade objects. It’s about time we stopped producing and started clarifying and reevaluating the objects we have put into the world. The situation now has a political dimension. It no longer has anything to do with political structures but is related to the very nature of this critical search”.

Tony Cragg interviewed by Demosthenes Davvetas, 1985